Overviewing supported data sources - AWS QuickSight Tutorial

- [Instructor] In Quick Sight, we first need to get our data before we can create visualizations. We create data sets by utilizing the ETL framework to extract data from our sources, transform the data table as needed and load it into our Quick Sight analysis. This chapter focuses on extracting data from a variety of sources. In Quick sight, we start in the home page where you'll see any pre-existing analysis such as those created by your colleagues or even some examples from Quick Sight. Since we don't have any data sets loaded yet into Quick Sight, we need to create our own. To access the data source connections, select the manage data button at the top right. This takes us to a screen where we can see any of our existing data sets or data sets shared with us once we create the connections. At the top left, select new data set. In this screen, we can see a pane of data source connection options. Keep in mind that these are the options at the time of recording of this course. You may see newer connection options in your own Quick sight view. If you're looking for detailed technical documentation on setting up Quick Sight data connections, you can check out this AWS documentation. You can also do an online search with the keywords for the specific data source, along with AWS Quick Sight to get some direction. We now need to get our own data to connect to. Let's explore free public data sources that we can leverage. AWS supports an open data registry of public data source connections on this webpage. This includes connections to weather data from NOAA, the U.S. weather agency. You can pull daily weather data by station both in the U.S. and around the world over 200 year plus time period. If you navigate to the NOAA website, you can learn more about their work. We can also get our own custom data from their data portal. On this page within the NOAA website, we can see the options to connecting to this daily weather data. We scroll down on the web page. Then select GHCN daily, this hyperlink. This takes us to a new web page called, the climate data online search where we can query data from the NOAA database using our own selection criteria. You can see the database we selected displayed in the top menu option of the page. If you want to use another NOAA data set, you can select it from the drop-down menu. Next inner query criteria, we're going to enter the date range. Notice that it defaults from the first day of the current year through today. Let's change this date to a date earlier in the year. I'm going to select April 16th. You can change the dates to a different date range than this, but note that NOAA restricts this query to dates within a single calendar year. We also have limitations on the size of the data set that it can return, which is why I took about a month off the pre-selected date range. Next, you can select the geographical hierarchy level you want to query for. By default, it searches at the station level for our selected stations. We can change the geographical search level to state instead from the drop-down list. Now our query will return data for all the stations that meet our search criteria at the state level. We type in California... Into our search term text bar. This enters a criteria for the state we want to search for. Capitalization doesn't matter, so we can enter the location name and lowercase letters. Once we've entered our search criteria, select the search button at the bottom to continue on to the next page. This next page displays a confirmation of our search criteria. We select the item in the list on the left to add it to our cart, so we can process the order. Next, we select the item in the cart on the top right corner of the map and select view all items. We've now want to confirm or tell the query how we want to receive our data. We select the format of the report we want to receive. PDF files are nicely formatted for sharing, but to easily set up at the data connection in Quick Sight, we select the CSV file by selecting that particular radio button. And we can confirm our date range. In this case, I'm going to change the date range and make sure you hit apply to save the date range you've chosen. We then hit continue at bottom of the page. In this page, we're going to specify the details we want the query to return. We start scrolling down. We're going to select not only the station name, but also the geographic location and to include the data flags. We can also select between standard and metric units. Those of you using meters and centigrade, they want to select the metric option instead, but we'll stick with standard. Next, we want to add our weather value fields to the query. If we open up the precipitation menu, we're going to select PRCP for the rainfall. Now in the air temperature, we're going to select TAVG, T max and T minimum or T min. This adds the maximum temperature, minimum temperature and average temperature to our query. We select the continue button at the bottom to confirm our choices. We then need to enter our email address into this confirmation page to tell NOAA where to send the query results. When we hit submit order at the bottom, the data requests goes into a processing queue to query the NOAA database. You'll receive a confirmation email for submitting the request, another email after that that contains the output file for your data query request.